August

Well, it's the middle of August. I've gotten a handful of cherry tomatoes and harvested three full size tomatoes this morning, some of which went on my breakfast tomato sandwich, the first of the season. (Er...this was a week ago.) (Also, I was proud that my morning breakfast was 98% local food. All local except for about 1/4 teaspoon of sugar...) The beans are apparently not dead, but they're starting to grow and I have some zucchinis coming soon.

Where, you might ask, have I been? Well, dear readers (all five of you - Mom, Reid, Erin, Simon, & Ivan- If there are more, please let yourself be known!), I have been on vacation and then sequestered in my office or in a corn field in Iowa. So I give you pictorial & literary proof of my travels.

I flew to visit my parents and brother in early July and embarked on a five state, two province, 2400 mile road trip with my mom to visit relatives & Simon.

Exhibit A: In which my mom and I crash (not literally) at Simon's house and I get to meet Ivan and spread bacony joy. If you are confused, I am in fact Simon P. In most situations, I do not come prepared with bacon. Although I just discovered bacon chapstick exists, so that may change. Here, Simon and Ivan, of simonandivan.blogspot.com fame, attempt to chip off pieces of bacon caramel. (The image is blurred to protect Simon's bacon-hating privacy)

Exhibit B: In which my mom and I go to Parliament Hill in Ottawa and at the Changing of the Guards, they play La Marseillaise (among other tunes) and not O Canada!

Exhibit C: In which mom and I go to Montreal,

Obviously this is me in Montreal. Can't you see that everyone around me is speaking French?

eat bagels (with and without cheese),

and see the native Montreal people, who are apparently quite tall during the Just For Laughs Festival.

Part Two coming soon...

Garden Update

4 big tomatoes + lots of flowers

16 cherry tomatoes + lots of flowers

6 zucchini blooms

I think today will be a 180oz of water day. The plants weren't droopy when I got home and I set up the bean trellis, tied up some of the tomatoes, and spread some fertilizer. I can just about taste those tomatoes...

Picture Post

I've been busy lately. Here are some pictures.

My first (cherry) tomatoes! I currently have 14 tomatoes growing, with lots more buds on the way. In addition, between last night and this morning, my zucchini plant has flowered as well. So now I am conflicted as to whether I should stuff and fry the squash blossoms or wait for the zucchinis. My poor plants have had their water dosage upped as well. They have been getting 120 oz of water a day. Yesterday we had a high of 94. They looked very droopy and sad when I got home, so they ended up with 240 oz of water yesterday. Today they've already had 120 oz, so hopefully they won't be too droopy by the time I get home. (High is currently 94 and rising)
This weekend I was invited to go to the performance of the Ramsey's Braggarts Morris Men. There's a very complicated story as to why I was invited, but I'll save that. Watching made me miss dancing, and I think I'm going to go check out the dance scene later this summer.

After the dance performances, all the dancers and watchers got on the trolley that goes between Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun. It was made especially fun by the fact that all the dancers were singing songs, some of which had multiple parts. There was even a round.

Yesterday they began digging up our street. Or the end of our street really. We were notified about this last week and the construction will go until October. They've closed the standard entrance to the street and made the street two way instead of one way as it usually is. Apparently they have to dig down 20 feet and move some pipes around. 

Container Gardening

I have WAY too much growing on our tiny little communal balcony. Here's a glimpse:


Tomatoes (large), yellow cherry tomatoes, yellow pear cherry tomatoes, Kentucky Wonder beans, Zucchini, leaf lettuce, spinach, basil, and carrots

Plus we have two orphan tomato plants and two of the neighbors basil plants. Mmm. Can't wait for some veggies.

What I'm reading

These days I've been doing a lot of reading about food. Checked out from the library I have Food Matters by Mark Bittman and A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg. In addition, I'm also in the process of reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.

A Homemade Life is a collection of stories and recipes. The stories are memories and the recipes are the associated tastes and foods of those stories. Molly started as a blogger (http://orangette.blogspot.com) though due to the book and her husband's pizza restaurant, hasn't been blogging much lately. But reading her stories today made me go back in the archives, and, following a couple of links, I found this gem: Shortbread Waffles. I'm making those this weekend FOR SURE!. Mmm.

A Homemade Life, in some ways, could be my story. She sees things very much the way I do, so while my family, friends, and obsession with a country may be different (her's France, mine England-where food is not the forefront mostly) our ideas about food are much the same.

Here are some passages from the book:
"Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things. I like the way the knife claps when it meets the cutting board. I like the haze of sweet air that hovers over a hot cake as it sits, cooling, on the counter. I like the way a strip of orange peel looks on an empty plate. But what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells."

"Every girl needs a little incubating from time to time, especially when she's about to become someone's wife. She needs ten days with her mother, a solid supply of baguette sandwiches, some well-aged cheese, a lot of chocolate, and some old-fashioned, fat-rippled, devil-may-care eating, which, for future reference, is immensely fortifying."

How could you not love a book like that? Especially when each chapter is attached to a recipe like Custard-Filled Corn Bread or Vanilla Bean Buttermilk Cake with Glazed Oranges and Creme Fraiche. Molly even manages to make her recipe for Stewed Prunes with Citrus and Cinnamon sound appealing...and that's a feat.

Go find a copy and immerse yourself in it. My copy came to me courtesy of the public library, but I may have to go and buy one soon. It's back to the book for me though, I need to read about pickling. And then it will be on to my next tome: Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. I need to get some pancetta or bacon made this summer to participate in Ruhlman's BLT challenge.

FLICKR pictures

I haven't written much about the hiking trip yet, but I finally got all my pictures uploaded. They can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kp_kyak/sets/72157617798644085/

If you're patient, my next task is actually labeling them all, so they make some sense.

Obsessions

I'm a strange person. For many reasons, but one of them is the way I treat new things. If I download some new music on iTunes, say the semester of choir music, I almost instantly become very attached to one of the pieces. I listen to it multiple times in a row, multiple times a day, for a few weeks. Then I've worn it out and go on to a new thing.

The thing could be a book, a piece of music, a musical artist or composer, a food, a blog, or a tv show. Recently some of these obsessions have been the song Popular from Wicked (music), Unicornis Captivatur by Ola Gjeilo (music), chocolate milkshakes, Hungry Monkey by Matthew Amster-Burton (book - but his blog Roots and Grubs is a previous obsession), and The Girl Who Ate Everything by Robyn Lee (blog).

The music obsessions are the easiest and are usually cured with $.99 on iTunes and about 4-8 listens per day, usually on the bus. The blogs are the hardest because I can spend whole weekends going through archived posts. The book obsessions are odd, because usually I'll only read the book once, but then I'll reference it a lot and tell other people about it. Or, in the case of Hungry Monkey, I read it, then cook from it, tell people about it, AND watch all the press about it. (Tonight I made Yeasted Waffles with candied bacon a la Joy the Baker)

But one of the interesting side effects of this is that encountering the obsession at a later date brings back strong memories of the time of the obsession. Hearing Stan Rogers or Da Vinci's Notebook brings me back to my dorm room in college, Gordon Lightfoot and the Cambridge Singers remind me of my parents' house, and Kate Rusby of spring break in 2004 wandering around Europe. Nachos and ice cream sundaes are spring semester Senior year of college. Madeleine L'Engle with the spring of Junior year of High School when I read 30 of her books in a month for a "research project" at school.

So that's a little insight into me...

Outrage followed by childish grins

So there's a news story in the Minnesota papers that's made it to national news. I first noticed it last week before it was such a big deal.

The basis of the story is this. There's a 13 year old boy in a town called Sleepy Eye, MN who has Hodgkin's lymphoma. His story was in the paper last week because he and his family are refusing chemotherapy. Chemo which would rid him of cancer with 85-90% liklihood. Without it, his doctors predict he will die within five years. Last week the court decided it was medical negligence and ruled that yesterday he get a chest x-ray. He got it and the cancer is back to the level it was before he got his single chemo treatment. Today they had a court hearing to determine what to do. BUT...he didn't show up. And he and his mom are missing. (Which is why this is a national case now...)

From the Star Tribune article: "Anthony Hauser said he last spoke to his wife about 4 p.m. Monday as he milked cows at the family farm near Sleepy Eye. He said his wife told him she was going to leave and "That's all you need to know.""

So now there's a warrant for the mom's arrest in any state and the prosecuter is working to see if he can get the dad put in jail until the child is found. The judge also found the mom in contempt of court and has ordered the boy to be put into a foster home as soon as he's found where he will get medical treatment. "County officials had "kind of suspected this would happen,""

I read some of the court transcripts last week which fascinated me in a way. The boy is one of eight children in a Catholic household, but his family also subscribes to the belief that natural medicine will cure all.

This wouldn't be quite so bad if it seemed like the boy was educated to the point where he would seem to understand the decision he's making...BUT that is not the fact. Unfortunately he's one of the people that gives "home-schooling" a bad name. From a Star Tribune opinion piece: "When tested by his teacher for entrance into a charter school, according to court documents, Daniel, who had been home-schooled, could not identify the following word: "The." "

More info from the Star Tribune.

So hopefully the boy will be found and he'll get his treatment and learn to make decisions for himself.

BUT I want to end this on a happy note, so I'll send you off to watch this clip of a incredibly functional family. Matthew Amster-Burton is a fun food writer who became a stay at home dad when his daughter Iris was born. He has a new book out called "Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater." The book is fun, fast, and full of stories and recipes. Matthew and Iris were on CBS' Early Show this morning. Check out the clip on his blog.

Foreign Language Help

I'm currently doing research that involves online communities and multiple languages. As part of this, I'm analyzing some exceedingly popular languages (Spanish, German, Japanese...) as well as some less studied communities (Volapuk, Ukrainian, Esperanto).

The idea is that we're doing some basic text processing. To reduce the amount of time this takes and the value of the analysis, we're wanting to exclude a standard list of stop words. These are words, in English, such as in to a and the that, etc. (Examples in English, German, French) While I can find these for most European languages and have learned of other languages (Japanese, Chinese) don't really have a concept of stop words in their language.

While I've found stop word lists for most of the languages, I'm stumped on three languages: Esperanto, Volapuk, Ukrainian, and Bengali. Any insights would be appreciated.

Still slacking...more eye candy

So I'm still bad about posting, but I know some of you check everyday for posts, so here's a picture. My travel and life should calm down in a week, so hopefully I'll post about my trips and migraines and many other things that Simon and I have been brainstorming. (Click for higher resolution photos.)

Panorama of the canyon at Coyote Gulch (on the way out)

Panorama of basecamp: Everyone is lounging around reading except for Charles and Reid who are cooking dinner. Apologies to Andy W. because in this panorama his head got squished.